I’m the cofounder of Life360, a company I’ve grown from seed to IPO, now with about 600 employees. This whole issue can be addressed by embracing a straightforward social contract, something I share openly with everyone I hire:
No promises of lifetime employment. I’m focused on the long-term health of the company, and our needs will inevitably change. If we continue to grow, it’s almost guaranteed that not everyone will be the right fit at every stage.
No expectation of loyalty. The flip side is that we aim to attract ambitious, hungry people, which means we need to provide real opportunities for career advancement. If we can’t, I understand you’ll move on.
If we let someone go after a single bad quarter, that’s on us for being shortsighted. We know people have ups and downs, and we don’t want to be overly sentimental, but we also don’t want to act rashly. On the other hand, if someone’s job-hopping every year, that’s usually a sign of short-term thinking. From 2014–2021, job-hopping didn’t matter much. Now, it’s becoming clear that those signals are important again.
At the end of the day, it’s not about judgment—no good/bad or right/wrong here (aside from obvious dealbreakers like dishonesty). It’s just adults making tradeoffs.
That said, I’ve seen how some companies shy away from being upfront about this, which leads to cynicism. We’ve had moments like that too—at some point, we started calling ourselves “a family.” I shut that down fast. It wasn’t popular, but it helped clarify our stance. You know what you’re signing up for with us.
I'm the CEO of Tile and we are working on a line of products for theft.
As a genuine question, I'm very surprised that many people don't seem concerned that AirTags alert thieves to their presence. If your bike is stolen the thief will get the notification, even if they are on Android (with the new shared platform rogue tag detection).
I'm trying to understand the user psychology here - not pitch our own products.
Do you have any specific features you would like to prevent theft?
Great to meet you. I have a ton of thoughts on this matter, but not well threaded for quick reply: so forgive the stream-of-thought nature of the following.
There is no real secret answer to stopping bike thieves, because the primary problem is both cultural and infrastructure.
We dont have bike culture that allows for safe bike leaving-about, and we dont have bike infrastructure for safe bike locking-about. (Bike Hack SF: Take your nice bike into a nice hotel and tip the DoorMan $5 to check your bike into luggage check rather than lock it up)
So, my airtag is in a case with security bolts under the bottle cage - and its more a check that I can know where it was last seen. Though I didnt remove the chirper.
What if you could have a TILE that is the fob for this battery. Where the battery wont go unless the paired Tile Fob is present?
A Lora Tile would be killer If you had a Lora network on this battery, with a TILE app infra on top of it and all the batteries talked to eachother - you built an anti-theft-mesh so all the bikes tiles all tell eachother about themselves.
Tile integration with Shimano Motors and e-tube iso app to stop the motor from running unless Tile fob/phone app present. A magnetic Solonoid crank-shaft-blocker.
And above all else pushing for better bike policies in municipalities.
We are doing a satellite integration with Hubble Network - 24/7 global coverage, no increase in battery life. It sounds like scifi but 2 satellites are up. Give us a year...
I want to build things using Instant DB... I keep finding ShinyObjects here, but - Tiles using a LORA Network which updates a csv/json style payload and transfers GPS through lora messages.
I think there a lot of interesting things to make bike mesh a part of a security fabric - but ensuring that there is no way to spy on location data thats not yours? Doubt thats possible...
The fact that something is being tracked and the thieves know it’s being tracked is a deterrent itself. Like the value of stolen iPhones crashed because activation lock made them worthless. So they moved on to Samsung Galaxies, until they implemented their own activation lock.
If you steal a bike with a tracker on it you’ll probably leave it right there for the real owner to find.
Of course I know this, but I am trying to go deeper. With AirTags and the new standards you literally can find and disable the tag for anyone using the Google or Apple networks.
I am surprised that people think the benefits of AirTags outweigh the downsides given the alternatives, of which we are one. I'm mainly just trying to learn.
I also think you probably are overestimating the deterrent value. Thieves are not necessarily thoughtful and the alerts aren't real time. Once they get the alert they might ditch the bike, but if it is back at their garage they will probably disable or remove it.
I also am a bit triggered by this line "Honestly, you as the CEO should know this." which is on the edge of being an ad hominem. Why did you choose to include this? And wouldn't you know that I know these things? Like I am asking questions to get nuanced user feedback. Do you think someone who runs a consumer product company (I started Life360, Tile's owner), isn't deeply aware of how customers think?
First, I want to apologize. The last statement came out a lot more combatant than I realized. So I removed it.
I was a Tile wallet user until I stopped carrying a wallet completely. There are 2 types of thieves: the professional and the opportunistic. Opportunistic, the majority, aren't doing more than they have to and if the bike has a tracker they know about it makes it less appealing. And if you can get the casual thief to give up immediately then the device has already payed for itself.
The professional will chop it immediately. I see kids in my neighborhood with $2000+ Trek Marlins, with all the expensive mountain bike parts removed. They simply wanted a bike to freestyle on. And doing all that probably took hours if not days. The professional is not going to spend anymore time than they have to disable a tracker when there are better options all around.
Im curious how Tile addresses this concern for the safety of individuals themselves in the opposite direction. I know people who have been stalked and assaulted before. Does tile have protections against this for people hiding tiles in your vehicle or bag?
I second this. My day job is tech but I redid a rental property. I told the workers to wear a harness on the roof. I didn’t cheap out and bought nice comfortable equipment.
They told me they were wearing it, but I came by unannounced and there they were on the roof with no harness.
I asked the supervisor what was up and they were doing the same thing to him. They would put it on then take it off as soon as no one was looking.
It was Latin machismo - the social pressure was so strong to not look goofy in a harness. The second time I saw this happen I wrote a firm zero tolerance letter which I translated to Spanish and hand delivered.
One of the crew still didn’t listen. I fired him.
(Not saying that reckless bosses aren’t an issue, especially in these trenching incidents where the safety equipment didn’t exist)
Is this "Latin machismo"? Look at the cyclists on the streets, I don't know where you live but everywhere I've been in the US at least half of them are without a helmet. It just appears that most people don't believe that things that have not happened to them are real. They don't grab a hot skillet only because they have done that and found that it's quite painful. They don't wear a helmet or any PPE because they have not experienced the things it's supposed to protect them from.
>Cycling without a helmet may not be statistically safer. See for example "The Ultimate Question: With or Without a Helmet?"
I believe you wanted to say "may be statistically safer" because the article you referenced tries to infer that helmets cause more accidents even though significantly reduce the number of fatal/serious ones. What if construction workers also want to be "statistically safer" in this sense?
It's trivial to see that PPE that prevents fatal and debilitating injuries is going to increase the total number of injuries as a person, who otherwise would have died or stopped participating in the dangerous activity forever, can go on and accrue more minor injuries.
That could be, my point is that people can not be wearing a helmet because they think it is better not to do so from a safety perspective. They could be making a deliberate decision that they think is in their own best health interest.
I'm curious how liability works in this situation and when it ends? It sounds like you were operating as a general contractor. Were you paying the roofers salary or did you have a business to business relationship?
Relatedly, someone was telling me what workers insurance is 1% of construction costs for large infrastructure like building hospitals.
I’m technically an owner builder. I have a workman’s comp policy that ranges from 10-40% of payroll depending on the task. For a residential project I can definitively say insurance is way more than 1% of total cost. Eg for the sake of round numbers, let’s say labor is 50% of the total. If I take the absolute lowest percent of what I pay for insurance, we already are up to 5%.
This is separate from liability insurance for say negligence if I got sued. I hope my umbrella policy would cover me here but I found in my situation it is a bit confusing. An insurance broker struggled to give me clear answers
That doesn't surprise me. I imagine that construction labor is a lower fraction of expenses for very large projects, as well as real risk, and overhead.
In the conversation, they told me that their #bigco was able to save X hundred million a year by creating their own insurance company and requiring all of their contract builders to use it.
You are proving this is a management issue. You took steps to address the issue. Fired people who didn’t listen. The fact they thought they could do it without consequences means they never got into trouble by management at other job sites. If your industry has a culture of not following safety procedures it’s only because bosses don’t enforce it.
Sure, in theory you are correct, but it misses the nuances of human reality.
Flipping back to my day job, a counter example is security people covering any edge case so that everything grinds to a halt or lawyers over processing everything and stifling creativity.
The same people that might grumble about something being a management issue sometimes also complain about bureaucracy and process when things go the other way.
There aren’t simple trade off free answers to this stuff.
Telling people to wear a harness is not "covering every edge case so that everything grinds to a halt". It's just ensuring that the bare minimum is being done to prevent workplace deaths.
I think it's a misleading argument because it compares things that aren't alike.
On the one hand, we have management telling workers to use safety equipment that basically everyone agrees is necessary. That has nothing to do with bureaucracy, it's about preventing people from cutting corners.
On the other hand, we have clueless interns sending questionaires to vendors, who then tell their own clueless interns to fill them with some buzzwords, just to be filed away without anyone actually looking at the completed form, in order to check some compliance checkbox somewhere.
Yes, a top-down safety culture entails some level of bureaucracy and process overhead. That is the price that must be paid for jobsite safety. No one is saying there's a free lunch.
If safety is cheap but overcoming culture is expensive, at some point it becomes misleading (wrt ethics of participants, not correct course of action) to say the problem is that management doesn't care enough to spend money on safety, even if management is the only lever we have to fix the issue.
That depends on what level of the RCA you are looking at it. It can be simultaneously true that workers dont want to wear them and bosses dont enforce it. Understanding both facts is important for risk reduction.
There were still no real consequences. At least today, that crew has a several month long waiting list and will just shrug and walk over to the next job. You really need to get OSHA involved and for it to start costing companies money.
Unless I read it wrong, OP fired the whole company/crew, not individual workers.
The company is responsible for workers that are improperly trained or out of control. If the supervisor can't enforce workplace safety rules, then the supervisor isn't doing his job, and if the company does not have process in place ensuring the supervisor is doing his job, then the company needs to be fined, too.
I can't believe we have this attitude of throwing up our hands and saying "Aww shucks, ya just can't convince those darn individual machismo men to do their job right. What can ya do?"
OP wrote "One of the crew still didn’t listen. I fired him." He fired the offending worker, not the whole company. Though in general I agree regarding supervisors.
I wonder if your memory is an outlier? If I play a game, read a book, or watch a movie within a year or two I remember the edges and themes but I’ll forget the details of the plot.
Myst is an exception which is probably a testament to how impactful it was to 11 year old me, but I’ve played Riven twice and I could barely tell you what it is about. If I play it again, I’ll start getting my memory jogged and it won’t completely be like starting from scratch but pretty close to it.
Dementia runs in my family so I am always paranoid about lapses in my memory (I’m 40). When I talk to others I don’t seem to be alone.
FWIW, I remember the games I was really into fairly well. I'm not sure if I'll ever forget the Red Dead Redemption 2 main quest line. Games like Halo 3 are a bit harder for me though, because it's a lot of the same grinding over and over.
CEO of Tile/Life360 here - I made a meta comment but I'll call out that because all Life360 users now scan for Tiles, and we are on 1 in 8 phones in the US, our network is actually huge. The small network thing is a misperception. We bought Tile knowing we could supercharge their previously small network.
I was in the location data space. These guys got out completely. It was a big loss to the industry since they had great coverage. They definitely weren’t lying about that.
I'm a Tile owner (soon to be ex-owner), and I think your response is a little disingenuous. When Google announced recently they'd open up their Find My Device network to bluetooth trackers, I assumed for sure Tile would be on board. I was dismayed to discover Tile specifically has no plans to join the Android Find My Device network, unlike Chipolo and Pebblebee. So I switched to Pebblebee.
The Life360 network may be sizable but it's going to me nowhere close to the iOS or Android networks, and it's going to get a lot smaller with folks like me leaving. If Tile supported the Android Find My Device network I would have stayed.
I disagree. There's a clear disclaimer of who they are, and they're responding to a specific criticism.
Their comment at the top level also has that disclaimer and while it's written in a bit of a marketing tone, it adds substantive value to the discussion.
One major value of HN is that we get people who are actively involved in building various pieces of technology directly engaging with the community. When there's a strong disclosure of who they are, that's almost always a good thing. (Of course, some organisations don't encourage that disclosure and that's a little more ambiguous).
I think it's pretty fair to make this clarification and I don't fault a company for wanting to squash misinformation about their product. I found it to be a useful comment because I had no sense of the scale of the Tile network, and I did have an intuition that it was much smaller.
I have zero affiliation with Tile and I have never bought any device like this of any sort, but this is useful information to me as someone who has been the target of frequent bicycle theft.
The criticism I will agree with is that it does feel worded a with a bit of a corporate polished tone that does give that vibe. edit: I think it's largely the "supercharge" descriptor.
Like @RobertRies, I found this comment useful. I've never bought a Tile but now that I know they have this much penetration I'm somewhat more likely to. I also had not seen the other posts by GP, so don't find it redundant.
We decided to opt out of the Google and Apple finding networks and the new proposed standards because it completely ruins the ability to use Bluetooth devices to deter theft. If you put an AirTag on say your bike, and thief steals it, they will get a notification and immediately just find and disable it.
We actually built a (controversial) feature that lets you opt out of anti-stalking features if you scan a government ID. As of today, we have zero known instances of abuse—the friction of scanning an ID is enough to make a bad guy think twice, and a committed stalker can just go get an LTE-enabled stealth GPS device on Amazon. It is crazy that the press and regulators focus on Bluetooth devices when actual stalking devices are readily available.
Some people are commenting on how small our network is. People don't realize that Life360 is on 1 in 8 phones in the US. We are huge outside of tech bubbles. If you are at an airport, mall, or anywhere with any meaningful density of people, our network is on par with the big guys. There is a J curve to the benefits of increasing density, and outside of rural areas we essentially have complete coverage.
Beyond this, we just announced a new satellite-to-Bluetooth network this morning, and we plan to open it up to developers in 2025. It won't matter where you lose your stuff, we will be able to find it. And thieves won't.
> because it completely ruins the ability to use Bluetooth devices to deter theft
I'd rather have the assurance that at-risk groups like women, marginalized people, and notable people are not at risk of having a cheap and easy to use location tracker attached to them. As others have pointed out, these trackers are not meant for, and are ill-suited to use as anti-theft devices. We've had Lojack like devices for years and they'll still work all the same regardless of the reporting standard.
> People don't realize that Life360 is on 1 in 8 phones in the US.
So that's 12% of devices. Another way to look at it is you have a 1 in 8 chance that the device will work and notify you when a potential reporting device approaches it.
> CEO of Tile / Life360 here.
As an Android user who is only now getting to use Bluetooth beacon tech like our iPhone friends have had with airtags for quite some time, I'm in the market for these devices. Your statement here makes me think I should look for devices other than Tile, even if they did participate in the standard.
> As of today, we have zero known instances of abuse
Emphasis on known. The whole point of stalking is to hide the device and not get caught. How would a typical victim even discover it? Or even if they figured out they were stalked, that it was with a Tile device and thus report it?
ID scanning is easy to defeat. This is just ripe for abuse and it's good that Apple/Google took measures to block stalking, even at the expense of anti theft use cases.
And if it was a tile device, that it had the "help me stalk people" feature turned on. And if it did have that feature turned on, that they should report it to tile. Generally I would expect a significant fraction of people in this sort of situation aren't reporting it to anyone.
Considering the multiple examples listed in the lawsuit [1] that the CEO is aware of, there are certainly stalking instances that they know about. Just none that they know of since 2022 (when they introduced the anti stalking features) with the anti stalking features disabled.
I won't repeat what I have said in other comments but scroll down for more specific thoughts on the points you make.
At a meta-level, we don't think the bad behavior of a very very small number of abusive should degrade the product for tens of millions of good actors. Theft is unfortunately extremely prevalent and a key reason why customers by trackers - we think the greater good is to responsibly support this use case.
We have put safeguards in place that make it tough to use our products to stalk, and while nothing is perfect, the only complaints of stalking we have received are from people who were allegedly stalked by Tiles that did NOT have the anti-theft feature turned on. By adding this ID scanning friction, which includes a liveness check, we have empirical data that the bad actors go elsewhere.
Humans are lazy. The average person who steals a bike is not going to pull out a Bluetooth sniffer. And if they did, they would probably find dozens of nearby devices (try it yourself - I just did and have 53 Bluetooth devices near me).
Thieves will, however, reply to an alert that says there is a tracker following you and hit the "disable" button. Friction is key. Google and Apple are making it extremely easy for thieves. We are pushing back on this.
I was able to track down my stolen vehicle with the help of Tile and now put them hidden in all my vehicles since they don't alert like an Air Tag does.
This has reaffirmed my decision to use Tile. It seems it's now the most effective option for tracking my property among similar bluetooth tags. Stalking is awful but as you say there are many more effective tools for that, tools which will still be available to people who want to use them no matter what Tile does. If an effective product gets crippled - for a good cause, sure - but crippling it doesn't actually advance that cause, why do it?
We use a third party and they do a liveness scan with a live camera feed so it is not nearly that simple.
I'm sure we can come up with edge cases or potential ways people could cheat the system, but we are adding so much risk and friction to stalkers that they would likely just buy a real stealth GPS tracker with an LTE connection.
As a genuine question, why is there no outrage for these devices that are literally marketed as stealth trackers?
Yes, and we will fight it and win. This was also before we launched our anti-theft feature by the way.
If you want to see the insanity of going after bluetooth devices, just search "stealth GPS device" on google and see what comes up. Ebay is targeting me with an ad that says "Hidden GPS Tracking Device for sale" There are legit LTE enabled stalkers right there in plain sight.
> Some people are commenting on how small our network is.
I'm currently in a city, and when I open the map it gives me a circle telling me that there are 1,807 people using tile in that circle. This city population is a bit shy of 1 million, and while the circle doesn't cover it all it does cover the densest parts, so if we conservatively say 400,000 people in that circle then that means that the percentage of people with the app is about 0.45%. Now I don't know if the Life360 users are included in that count, that said I also have never heard of anyone who uses it here.
As an aside, I do wish the app were able to update more often. I have a tile tracker on my bike (and obviously the app on my phone), and I can leave a place, bike ten minutes to home, lock up the bike, go inside, and the app will often still tell me that my bike is where it was before I rode it home. I guess there's a battery tradeoff there though.
Hey; Tile user here. I can’t figure out your iPhone app any more.
It switches between modes at random (map, we’ll notify you, and the signal meter) when the signal is weak, and it says we have to replace batteries constantly. (Even though we just replaced them — is the tile shorted out internally, or do we have to reset a timer somewhere, or what?). Also, it spams upsell attempts while doing this. You may as well be displaying ads for competitors at this high-stress point in the UI flow!
Other than the above stuff, which feel kind of like bugs, I’ve noticed it’s hard to figure out which building (in a 1 acre space) our keys were last seen in. We own all the phones and tiles around here, so giving better precision probably wouldn’t be a privacy issue.
I’d rather go with a smaller, cross platform provider, but we’re seriously considering switching to AirTag.
Thanks for standing up for functionality vs. questionable privacy protection.
Weird- can you email me? chris@life360.com and I will forward this to get looked into. The map thing seems like a bug. I'd also like to learn more about your concerns on over upsells.
Personally I feel like the anti-theft nature of these devices is massively outweighed by the horrible outcomes of stalking and clandestine tracking. They're not a theft deterrent, in fact they're generally hidden so a thief has no idea it's there. And what are you going to do, show up with a posse to get your stuff back?
The world would be better if tracking devices did not exist. It's a shame you've decided to actively reject anti-stalking features.
I am very open to being wrong and changing course, but let's have a data-driven decision.
When we launched our anti-theft feature, we were clear that if we found there was widespread abuse, we would change course. We have had literally zero complaints of anyone being stalked with a device where anti-theft was enabled.
And I think you are misunderstanding the new standards. Google and Apple will proactively notify thieves of nearby trackers, and allow a thief to disable it. This is next level bad for anyone relying on their tracking device to protect against theft.
What is the data that would change your mind? I would change my mind if we found that more than .1% of our customers were abusing this feature.
How is it an anti-theft device if the thief doesn’t know it’s there?
I could see this being used in the aggregate to ascertain drop off points or chop shops, but at an individual level it doesn’t stop your stuff from being stolen. Even the aggregate case requires buy in from law enforcement to actually act on the information which is not a small thing.
Sure, I agree with that. We did user testing and people understood the concept. It is anti-theft in the sense you have a real chance of getting your stuff back, unlike with AirTags and now Google network devices where thieves will just disable the tracker.
As a personal bias, I believe companies like yours are pathologically unable to do the right thing. Take my reply with that in mind.
I carefully examined life360.com, trying to put myself in the shoes of somebody who was stalked, magically divined that life360 was involved, and wanted to report the issue. The extent of my options on life360.com are:
1. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
And that's it. There does not exist a "contact us" or other general mechanism, and there certainly does not exist an abuse reporting mechanism. If that happens to exist behind other filters or paywalls then it's not relevant when discussing how the average customer would interact with your website.
With that in mind, I would expect an exactly 0% abuse rate regardless of how abusive your product actually is. You confirm that number. I'm not surprised.
The ball is in your court. How do you prove to the world that you _actually_ care about abuse? How _should_ a real abusee interact with your website? Why isn't it obvious? What are the exact numbers? And so on...
That link specifically dissuades anyone who is a victim from contacting your company. It directs them to contact police or a lawyer, and you provide no ability in that link to contact your company.
I take that to mean there were zero law enforcement reports. Going to law enforcement is always your port of call when dealing with any sort of criminal activity happening as it relates to a tech company. Even Apple says this as it relates to AirTags.
Think about it for a second. If anyone could contact a tech company to get people's information based on a serial number, this would be abused by people who could steal your phone, airpods, or bag containing an airtag, claim to be stalked, contact the manufacturer directly, and get your home address from the manufacturer by giving them the serial number.
"If you feel your safety is at risk, you can contact your local law enforcement, who can work with Apple. You might need to provide the AirTag or its serial number."
> We have had literally zero complaints of anyone being stalked with a device where anti-theft was enabled.
First, it's highly likely that someone being stalked wouldn't realize a tile device was the cause. Secondly, you said Tile and Life360 are on only 12% of devices. So maybe 1 out of 10 stalkers will be successful in using your device to stalk. That's not enough data to state so conclusively that this doesn't happen. I'm sure if Tile was more popular (and thus more functional) and more stalkers knew they were the best devices for stalking, they would use them.
Theft is more common. Each instance of stalking does more damage. I haven't the faintest clue how I should weigh the cost against the benefit here, but I certainly don't like how the CEO here is blatantly attempting to downplay the stalking-enabling-externality their theft prevention device has.
Maybe in the US, I know several cases where stolen bikes were returned and thieves charged in central Europe. I've never lost anything, but had a bike stolen and I'm in fear of having another one stolen. GPS trackers are not a real option for me (monthly fee, high battery consumption, not having an e-bike which would make it easier). These trackers are a great idea and I do get why stalking is an issue. But I'm with the Tile CEO when it comes to other or even better options for stalking. GPS trackers are way more accurate and I assume that swapping them or recharging them is less of a concern in that case.
It's a shame that stalking is a concern. It's a shame that this had to be implemented and effectively breaks the devices use case for most people. But I'm not even mad at Apple or Google, because I also think that it is their responsibility to protect people from being stalked.
Tile is also not an option for me, in Europe pretty much no one uses it. I will still try my luck with Apple and Google/Pebblebee Tags. Does anyone have experience how long it takes until you get notified about a tracker moving with you?
> They're not a theft deterrent, in fact they're generally hidden so a thief has no idea it's there.
A potential car thief doesn't know if your car has an alarm on it either, but he just assumes that it does because most do. With wide enough adoption of these devices, it could work out the same.
I do agree there is a role for an anti-theft device specifically where there is vastly higher requirements from the user (government identification, liveness checks, etc).
I presumed such a device would require a low-power cellular service. Glad to see you're making it work using Bluetooth.
That said these higher requirements should not apply if the device has these anti-stalking notifications.
Judging from the pettiness of the negative comments against Tile, I have to assume it’s the single greatest product on the market! Also, it appears your comment is being suppressed, because the age and number of replies should put it higher, but it’s now buried hours later.
> If you put an AirTag on say your bike, and thief steals it, they will get a notification and immediately just find and disable it.
And if a stalker puts it there, me finding it is a feature.
> scan a government ID
Considering how badly companies keep my private data private, be it email addresses or even direct passwords, scanning a government ID for a $10 tag seems really bad from a privacy perspective. Once you get hacked too (like many other, larger companies have been), the hackers will have all the peoples ID scans too to use with another company implementing such features.
Edit: Hey man I'm not engaging you on this, you chose to opt-out of this safety feature and you've enabled stalkers that target at risk groups like me. Nope.
Yes, we were sued, but we will fight it and win. I think most people on Hacker News know to approach lawsuits with skepticism.
And I feel like many people being critical of us are arguing with emotions and not data. You have to scan a government ID and agree to severe penalties for misusing our product. We have had zero instances of reported stalking from anyone who has enabled the anti-theft feature.
Can you articulate with data why what we are doing is problematic?
I briefly installed Life360 when some members of a group trip tried to sell the rest of us on it as a sort of emergency personal location beacon, like the colonists had in Aliens. It's one of the most domestic-abuser-friendly apps I've ever seen.
Most of the people your products are being misused to stalk can't even turn off their location sharing because the person who's insisted they install the app/hardware will assume that doing so means they're off spending time with someone else, or whatever their personal paranoid fantasy is. Why would someone being subjected to that contact you? It would just enrage whoever is monitoring their movements when their account was suspended, or whatever your process is.
The people misusing your products in that way don't think they're doing anything wrong, so they're not going to hesitate to have you verify their ID.
> Most of the people your products are being misused to stalk can't even turn off their location sharing because the person who's insisted they install the app/hardware will assume that doing so means they're off spending time with someone else, or whatever their personal paranoid fantasy is.
Other than location history, is there a big difference between Life360 and builtin iPhone location sharing? To me, that's not enough to put the product in a different category.
Since you’re in an at-risk group, I strongly suggest you look into the sorts of devices the CEO mentioned, especially if you own a car (or any portable thing that could hold a pound of batteries, like a bike or a scooter).
Though some things in that space are marketed to stalkers, there are legitimate use cases for such technologies, and therefore the only LTE tracking devices I’ve seen in person were sold at reputable stores.
I’m about as anti-woke as it gets but I want to give the author credit for a well thought out article. If I discount any writing from “the enemy” I’ll just reinforce my filter bubble.
Are there specific things you didn’t agree with here?
>Men and women, on average, like different things.
To a huge population, preferential differences directly and fundamentally imply bias. You see the data and say "see, X", they see the same data and say "see, Y."
Although it is the opposite of what the doctors want, I would prefer a less sensitive but highly specific test.
If I had 80% sensitivity I'd miss out on 20% of cancers, but if I could match that with a 99.9% specificity I'd have very few false positives.
I hope this type of test can tune that direction.